The Roseledge Books Blog

Easy days at the winter digs. Spectacular sunrises with reds and blues that incorrectly promised later moisture.  Sailors did not have to take warning. Today’s blurry sky may change the tenor of our very warm — well, mild — snowless winter. Millie and I had what will probably be our last wine on the patio last week, at least the last wine wearing a sweater. I wore my latest knitting effort, an “evolving-stripe” pattern which might have been better balanced had I attended to the reds and blues of morning skies. Trying things is fun in knitting as elsewhere, but my goodness it takes a long time to recover stitches when I change my mind.

On to noteworthy newspaper items:

If you many “Downton Abbey” fans who read books also sail, you will find Roseledge Books ready with Charles Todd’s mysteries which are also set during and immediately after World War I, though I don’t recall which titles are on the RB shelf. It’s hard to read or think about those killing trenches of WWI and harder to look at them. I close my eyes.

Water, water everywhere in summer; big sky fills winter's window.

Soon-to-be IBM ex-President Sam Palmisano tells an interviewer that he kept IBM ahead of the curve by changing direction and helping people get through the mountains of data available to them.  To do this, he bought software companies that offered “data mining and analytic services.” He steps down a hero which is fine, but where is the notice that reference librarians have been doing this for a hundred-plus years? Please recall with fondness the librarian who shepherded you, other researchers and the generally curious through the mountains of information available to any and all in libraries.

An aside: James Webb’s Unobtrusive Measures is a fun read and good way to recall these earlier mountains of data in libraries, some of which  he called “running records.”  Remember the study, using water and electricity records, that concluded the Brits used the bathroom during the commercials on television?  Maybe that’s why their commercials are so often so good.  But I digress.

Oh librarians appreciate the occasional understated mention in an obscure appendix or acknowledgement, sure, but in the bigger picture, they have long made available organized, accessible information to anyone who wanted it.  And they know well the often unspoken rules underlying which sources to use when.  Face it; in today’s world the problem isn’t finding ten sources; it’s knowing which of 250 options to choose.  Clearly librarians needed to understand algorithms or befriend someone who did because for all of today’s access, way too few users know what makes a source good rather than just easy to find.

One sees jumble, another sees first sort. Both have usefulness in mind.

So it is good news when librarians and users make a move to improve the quality of cited sources. In this spirit, cheers to Wikipedia attenders and library providers when NYPL’s Performing Arts Library hosted an “editathon” for amateur digital archivists and musical theater devotees. Everybody wins. Wikipedia’s musical-theater-related entries use better evidence to make their points and the treasures in these Special Collections get visibility and a more explicit purpose. What fun! I wish I could have been there or that more libraries offered similar search events.

I loved Umberto Eco’s An Infinity of Lists for many reasons, but one big reason was that it included the contents of and rationales for many really strange collections.  Suddenly NYPL’s Special Collections had forebears.

Time to return to the Friday NYT crossword puzzle and decide if the constructor is a seasoned liberal arts graduate with a modest interest in sports whose references, especially slang references, I stand a chance of knowing.

My sister died last month, two weeks to the day after she went to the ER with a stomach ache. Call the cause complications of surgery or infection, both of which it was, her death was also surprising and, now, disconcerting. I have lost the last person who shared with me my early life and its obscure references and who could keep me honest when I wafted off into the embellishment of Irish truth, a gift I learned from my father. I will miss her.

Charyl's chair with favorite view; coffee, book, and drowsing, too. Good times.

Otherwise my almost perfect (Maine-less) autumn and warm, early winter days have been filled with the big skies of my 12th floor aerie and the arcane tidbits the (mostly) NYT offers one ever searching for news of moving information: how it moves and who can move or change it and why someone would do so. Others follow the money. (Remember Robert Woodward’s and Carl Bernstein’s All the President‘s Men?) I follow the (recorded) information which is never dead — though maybe dormant — and never neutral, says the searcher which most librarians are. And the trails may be amazingly circuitous. But to the tidbits:

First I have ready next to read Stephen Greenblatt’s book, The Swerve, which I expect to illustrate that recorded information is never dead, though nearly eternally dormant if not for a Renaissance book hunter who found it lying on a shelf and brought it back to life. Should be fun.

Then the nifty NYT story about Matthew White, the guy who searched for and collated information about skulls, buried because of conflict, anywhere or anytime. He found and accessed information from secondary sources, then gathered, evaluated, organized and distributed the results in his new book, The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History’s 100 Worst Atrocities. Wow! Results don’t interest me much, so I hope he also publishes an “appending volume” of search strategies because his is a nifty mind with a whole lot of searching know-how. If quality of sources determines or hugely affects or (name your level of influence here) the outcome of an argument, then transparent searching/collating sophistication is key. The critical comments in the story reflect the differences among accomplished content people — but no librarian/searchers on this point. I love searching and remembering that there are few (if any?) single right answers.

A favorite searching book is William Mitchell’s Clear Pond, though one friend thought him obsessive and a long-ago NYTBR reviewer thought the author’s meager findings made the book not worth the effort. I ordered it right away. Thomas Hoving’s King of the Confessors is another favorite search book, but skip over his dreams.

Searching tidbits, if anywhere noted, are often only in footnotes, e.g. what you tried to find and how, but couldn’t; where you looked and found a surprise So it is always fun to read a knowing argument for footnotes.   They often tell a second story which may be too project-specific, under-valued, or under-validated for prime-time inclusion but which make the major argument richer, e.g. the footnotes of research reports in Science. And Anthony Grafton’s book, Footnotes, is not to be forgotten.

But I natter. So more tidbits another day. For now, enjoy a  treasure from an anonymous giver in Edinburgh, Scotland made available to all of us with a click on these words. Then join me in figuring out the perfect read for family and friends this holiday season. I have been asked not to give any more library books without mentioning the due date, and I can’t mention the perfect read I found for Charlie because he might read this.  But stay tuned.

Amanda Knox was freed from an Italian jail last week. “Whew,” said a friend and RB reader who knew to be worried after reading Donna Leon’s mysteries set in Venice.

“Who’s surprised about the prescription drug shortage?” asked a medical professional and RB reader who recently read Catherine Coulter’s latest paperback thriller, Whiplash.

Clearly, these RB readers are ready for whatever comes next. “What do they read to be thus ready?” you ask, and isn’t that the question. What they read and why and what they “get” from doing so, I don’t know. But I do know what they choose from RB and sometimes the following summer I find out if the choice was good — or not.

In that spirit, here is a list of the books some August (august?) Roseledge Books readers chose last summer. What any one reader got from any one read is next summer‘s report. Why I chose them for RB comes in (maybe) the next post

Are lists and piles made of building blocks? Do big ones matter more? Why?

Abigail Adams by Woody Horton

The Beekeeper’s Apprentice by Laurie King
The Brothers Gardener by Andrea Wulf
The Cruelist Month by Louise Penny
The Canon by Natalie Ainger
Dogtown by Elyssa East
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Firewall by Henning Mankell
Frankie’s Place by Jim Sterba
Greenland by Gretel Erlich
The Hard Way by Lee Child
House of Rain by Craig Childs
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu
Islands in Time by Philip Conkling
John James Audubon by Richard Rhodes
Lasso the Wind by Timothy Egan
Last Places by Lawrence Millman
The Lobster Coast of Maine by Colin Woodard
The Long Ships by Frans Bengtsson
The Lost City of Z by David Grann
Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand by Helen Simonson
Old Books and Rare Friends by Madeline Stern and Leona Rostenberg
On [Monhegan] Island
Oppenheimer by Kai Bird
The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh by Linda Colley
Outlander by Diana Gabaldon
Pictures at an Exhibition by Sara Houghteling
The Snoring Bird by Bernd Heinrich
South Sea Tales by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostkova
That Old Cape Magic by Richard Russo
Travels With Herodotus by Ryszard Kapucinski
Voices by Arnaulder Indridason
Working at the Olsons by Andrew Wyeth

I’m not sure why, but this variety of titles coupled with the variety of minds choosing them surely indicates that  Roseledge Books’ readers are ready for whatever is next, which is a good thing because too many people without a clue seem to be too much with us.

An aside:  Listing books by title makes little sense, but acknowledges that the NYT Best Seller Lists and the mid-size jobber I frequent, both of whom  do so, may know something I don’t.   I prefer listing books by the author’s name; then I can link past and future events of note to idea junkies and thereby add to long-term building blocks  of memory well into my dotage which is a good thing because remembering is easier than checking reference sources with only one hand.

Booksellers are like book hunters; they search for the right book for the right reader at the right time. This is also the task of the librarian as posed by Ranganathan and of the information services provider in these digital days. But which 750 books are just right to have on the shelves of Roseledge Books? This is my ongoing puzzle and joy.

I no more than landed in Minnesota than I spotted two probable must-haves “of Maine” for RB next summer. The first is Ed Ureneck’s Cabin: Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine which is not yet out in paperback, is set in interior — rather than coastal — Maine, and uses the mid-western word, cabin, rather than the coastal terms, cottage or camp, to describe one’s dwelling, but which apparently describes the back-to-the-land dream of many as did Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance or John Casey’s Spartina, is set in Maine and is written by a former Portland newspaper editor who knows Maine. Tricky, these book-choosing decisions.

This view has changed. Walk to Roseledge Books next summer and figure out how.

The second must-have is The Plants of Acadia National Park compiled by four field botanists, “serious scientists” in reviewer Susan Hand Shetterly’s words (in Down East, October 2011), who offer a treasure of photographs, identification keys, historical and current collecting methods and suggestions for further reading to enjoy during a long winter’s night anywhere or a long summer’s day on the lighthouse lawn. Armed with some background, local readers (you) can explore local areas and begin an ever-growing list of local wildflower (or other plant) finds with annotations which will make the book a Tenants Harbor (or other area) treasure. Think of the hikes, kayak pauses, bike rides, and walks of fun and wonder. This makes it an activity book, like using Arnold Skolnick’s Paintings of Maine to identify which painters or paintings are near, then dear. After it all, RB ends us in the midst of many wildflowers and much art, and with you all, great
readers.

And then there is my latest thriller read, David Baldacci’s The Sixth Man, which, on page 8, has the main characters landing at the jetport in Portland, Maine. Will the good times never end?

More about book hunters next post. Charlie says I should keep these short, never easy for a born talker.

Last post I mentioned the struggle of finding just-right-reads for a noteworthy reader soon to have a knee replaced. Then today’s browse through NYTBR’s brought before my very eyes FOUR possibilities:

Great House by Nicole Kraus
“The characters…are intricately connected, across continents and decades, by a 19- drawer wooden desk….” Paperback Row, NYTBR, 9/25/2011

The Fall of the House of Walworth by Geoffrey O’Brien
“…the gaudy, multigenerational story of an upper-crust family in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. brought down by corruption, insanity and parricide.” Paperback Row, NYTBR, 9/25/2011

Life, like a good book, has assorted pieces that somehow make a whole.

Fall of Giants by Ken Follett (First of a 20th Century Trilogy)
“Five interrelated families from five countries are caught in the upheavals of WWI and the Russian Revolution.” Trade Paperback Best Sellers, NYTBR, 9/25/2011

The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance by Edmund de Waal
“A family memoir written with a grace and modesty that almost belie the sweep of its contents:…during the Second World War.” (NYer) “An extraordinary history…. A wonderful book, as lustrous and exquisitely crafted as the netsuke at its heart.” (Christian Science Monitor) Both from an ad for the paperback edition, NYTBR, 9/25/2011, p.33

Multigenerational sagas, art at the heart of the story, worldly adventures, fiction, non-fiction, and more to come. Time will pass, the knee will heal, and the mind grows.

Then, next summer, Roseledge Books will be open and part of whatever is next.

Minnesotans who know ask, “Was 2011 a good summer?”
It was, I say; let me count the ways.

The annual summer leftovers dinner went well.  My smoked salmon, miraculously packed, is good until 2014 (Thank you, North Carolina Regulars) and I used up all the stale crackers and generic Cheerios.  So not only was 2011′s last supper good, but 2012′s first supper sounds promising, too.

Roseledge Books’ final tally was a small plus for books sold over books ordered, WHEW.

Charlie pulled the dead Queen Anne’s Lace and the worst of the rogue bushes in the rosa rugosa hedge with only one sotto voce reference to Julie, who is in India and therefore not here for landscaping duty. (Please hurry back, Julie; I’m sure this is a one-time effort.)

Queen Anne's Lace blooms someplace else next year; goldenrod stays put and spreads. Sniff.

Moored yachts never filled the harbor after hurricane Irene which meant fewer RB visitors which is not good, but it was, therefore, an easier leave-taking.

I failed to think of the perfect book(s) for an RB Regular’s`six-week knee-replacement recovery reading in January, which is not good, but I’ll have to keep thinking and posting suggestions which is good.  Think other times and places, multi-generational, detail, art, maybe European. So far, Stacy Schiff’s Cleopatra is a “no ancient Egypt;”; Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter, which Millie read, is an “already read it;” James Clavell’s Shogun is a “maybe re-read;” Bernd Heinrich’s The Snoring Bird is an “too recently read, but really liked;“ Elizabeth Kostkova’s The Historian is a “no vampires or Vlad the Impaler” though her Swan Thieves was “really good;” and I don’t think Kate Morton’s Distant Hours is going to be sufficiently engrossing though it is fat and it was a “yes.” More suggestions anyone? I’ll send them on.

A long last look at moored lobster boats and ribs of "the wrecks" at low tide.

First frosts in the Maine valleys signaled Fall, which matters in an uninsulated cottage, so leaving was necessary and therefore easier.  Minnesota’s homecoming weekend of 90 degree days was TOO HOT even with insulation, but record-setting frosts followed which just demonstrates how unappealing it is to live an average life, which, with RB and you all, mine is not.

I tried another thriller and, yes again, Maine figured in. (First Paul Garrison’s The Sea Hunter which I liked and John Case’s The Syndrome which I liked, but not nearly as much as his The Genesis Code, which also has Maine in it.) Clearly Maine is thrilling and will continue to be so in books and movies until next summer.

Here‘s to then, through a winter of Minnesota postings.

Hurricane Irene blew down (or sogged up, if rain was the beast) trees, and some of the trees fell on wires that cut electricity to homes. A Maine friend had one such tree. Her neighbor said, “Your tree fell and now I cannot make my dress for my sister’s wedding next weekend.” Friend answered, “I’ve been telling you for two months to get going on the dress.” Pure Maine.

Minnesota friends were visiting Roseledge last week. They found and ate my stash of Willow Street Bakery molasses doughnuts which I had buried in a brown bag inside a plastic bag in my freezer. When I went to replace them, Willow Street Bakery was closed — I don’t know why — until six days after I return to Minnesota. I called my friend and said, “You ate all of the molasses doughnuts and now Willow Street Bakery is closed.” Without pause, she said, “We knew you’d be pleased at how much we enjoyed them.” Pure Minnesota.

So what makes something or someone “of Maine?”

Bunched lobster buoys, so much "of Maine," are not at all "of the Midwest."

The question arose when RB decided to have and continue to replace Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kittredge. I say “not of Maine” because Olive Kittredge is more a type than a Mainer. Certainly she, or her like, lives in Maine, but she lives in the North Dakota of my youth, too. And the lack of very specific place names, e.g. Harbor Woods, Barter Flats, Donut Point, Drift-in Beach, suggests the author has not been long enough in Maine. But I was the minority of one, so the question remains fun and will arise again next summer when J. Courtney Sullivan’s Maine is out in paperback. So far the reviewed emphasis is on the four women and the hard cover has too much sand and too little clothing, brr-r-r.

So, if not these two books, then which ones ARE about people who, one way or another, become “of Maine?” Consider the following:

Siddon, Anne Rivers. Colony, a novel by a woman who married into a family who has long summered in Maine and who also writes of coastal mores in North Carolina, which might make her Maine observations especially perceptive.
McCullough, David. 1776, a Revolutionary War history which includes early days of Thomaston’s Henry Knox.
Sterba, Jim. Frankie’s Place, a contemporary love story/memoir of Mt. Desert rusticator and Michigan transplant.
Coatsworth, Elizabeth. Personal Geography, “almost an autobiography” of author who, with Henry Beston, lived life fully on Maine farm.
Heinrich, Bernd. Snoring Bird, “my family’s journey through 100 years of biology” told through the lives of mostly German father and mostly Mainer son and author.
Zimmerman, Elizabeth. Knit One, Knit All, a knitting book, yes, but does the last page make it “of Maine?”

Okay, Roseledge Book Regulars, what do you think? What would you add? See you next year when the porch view of the harbor, a glass of chicken wine, and regetting together happen. Until then, Minnesota looms, you bet. Next post from the Group Home, as my new digs have now become.

Two readers came by on their way to Monhegan and bought books to read while there. This suggests a worthy potential-client pool to tap because a lot of people catch the Monhegan ferry in Port Clyde (4 miles further than TH on Rte.131) and reading is a major post-hike activity on the Island. I forgot to ask how they found RB because, though we are only a three-lot-wide block off Rte. 131, potentially interested people have to make that turn to either see the RB sign on the corner of Sea St. and Mechanic St. or to drive by and look away from the water long enough to register BOOKS, yes!

On Monhegan or almost any place almost any book from RB is just right. But a few do come more readily to mind:
General books sometimes include Monhegan, for example Colin Woodard’s Lobster Coast of Maine and Arnold Skolnick’s Paintings of Maine.
Island living is special. Elizabeth Gilbert’s Stern Man and Elizabeth Ogilvie’s Tide Trilogy are novels set on islands. Eva Murray’s Well Out to Sea chronicles her life on an island, in this case Matinicus.
T.J. Stiles’ The First Tycoon is a fat biography about Commodore Vanderbilt, who, among things, sailed — maybe near Monhegan.  Fat is a lovely luxury when the time is right.
Elizabeth Kostkova’s The Swan Thieves is a fat novel about art (among other things) which (among other things) is a favorite pastime on Monhegan.
There are more possibilities waiting for you when you stop by.

Wildflowers, wild seas, perchable rocks and a fat book to read.

Twice this summer people returned to RB after big-time sailing adventures. One couple sailed around the world in five of the last ten years and the other circled the Atlantic coasts these past three years. I loved that they came back, but now I don‘t recall what kinds of books they chose, except to say that no one chose a sailing chronicle, though one did take a book about islands. I’m currently reading Paul Garrison’s The Sea Hunter because I know way too little about boats, boating, and big water. It’s a thriller, includes a killphin (you’ll have to read it to find out), and the heroes are sailing to Camden, ME from the Caribbean, which is exciting because that is virtually next door to Tenants Harbor, home of RB. (You may recall the ongoing game of trying to figure out how many steps between any book and TH.)

One more week in Paradise. Weather’s perfect: sunny days, breezy late afternoons, cool nights. There’s still time. A hornet nearly committed suicide in my glass of wine, but a goodheart tipped it out and the hornet rose and looked confused.

Roseledge Books made it through the weather event almost unscathed. For two hours, the electricity flickered which is worrisome as I sleep in a powered recliner that is un-get-out-able except when upright. A very small backup battery maybe promises one lift out, but just in case, I slept sitting-up which I considered a surely doable half lift. A friend with a Verizon cell phone (AT&T doesn’t work in TH) was ready to come running at my call, but the flicks never stretched into an outage. So with a little nap today, all is well. A neighbor said that Hart’s Neck (across the harbor; see webcam) lost power, but it’s still sunny so I haven’t seen any absence of light.

And once again the Sea Street roadside gully handled the inch or two of rain.

The wind and the rain came through. I still have my book. All's right with the world.

The lobster boats stayed put, and I don’t know where the yachts on rental moorings went, but summer runabouts were hauled, as truck after truck lined up at the public landing to do their end-of-summer duty. Yikes!

The wind swirled in from the southwest which is the closed end of the harbor.  So the wind pushed the water out of the harbor which was a relief at high tide time to those right on the water. As a winter-Midwesterner, may I say that the wind was a modest blow at best, but I did put the porch chairs away for the day. So overall, a big whew!

Today Roseledge Books and the world nearby dried out with a sunny, cool breezy, end-of-summer day, but weather for the coming week is to be sunny, 70’s, and a bit of summer backlash, I hope. More book and reader news next time.

( Comment reply: RB has no insulation which means that however damp Roseledge insides get during foggy or humid days, the breezes sweep right through the single-board walls and dry it out in minutes — or so it seems. Having no insulation is one big reason I have only paperbacks and the reason they only curl, but never mildew. And paperbacks weigh less than a six-pack, the sailors assure me.)

Roseledge Books announces its first bestsellers of 2011!

Three copies sold of
Farley Mowat’s Bay of Spirits
Vance Lee’s Restitution
Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander

And, if RB had had a third copy to sell, of
Kai Bird’s Oppenheimer
Elizabeth Zimmermann’s Knit One, Knit All

And three different titles sold of books by bestselling authors
Timothy Egan    (The Good Rain, Lasso the Wind, Bad Burn)
Lee Child       (The Enemy, The Persuader, Gone Tomorrow)

Eating, reading, talking with friends -- the fun of summer by the seaside.

Of course this list does not include those single books sold which were read by more than one person. For instance, a visitor who usually reads fiction bought Ryszard Kapuscinski’s Travels with Herodotus and Madeline Stern and Leona Rostenberg’s Old Books and Rare Friends. Walking by later, her spouse, who usually reads non-fiction, shouted at those of us enjoying the RB porch wine, view, and proximity to walkers-by that he had two new non-fiction books to read. We shouted “Yea” and would have exchanged air-fist-pumps with his wife if we had thought of it. And, he went on, he had just learned that his life would have been better if he had read Herodotus. “There’s still time,” we shouted back. Next summer, RB will be sure to have Robert Strassler’s The Landmark Herodotus for the return visit.

Finally, some “big sticks” (read: tall masts) coming into the harbor and walkers-by enjoying the drying, if early autumn, breeze. I finished Helen Simonson’s Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand; yes, to you who asked, it might be a good common read for oldtimers and newcomers who can’t get along. Readers who like to read about individual books other readers are choosing might prefer Helerne Hanff’s 84 Charing Cross Road and Q’s Legacy or Sara Nelson’s So Many Books, So Little Time to Larry McMurtry‘s Books: A Memoir. I’ve just started Michael Harvey’s The Fifth Floor for my every-so-often Chicago jolt.

Not quite three weeks left. Long sigh. Time enough, if you hurry.